Re: Signature configurability: documentation review

From:

Bob Sidebotham

Subject:

Re: Signature configurability: documentation review

Date:

Sat, 31 Mar 2001 22:31:26 -0800 (PST)

Hi Steven,
Looks good! I've read other people's comments which I basically agree
with. So just a couple of additional comments:
I found the consign/content/build stuff to be confusing initially,
because it wasn't clear to me, on first reading, that "content/build"
were paired, and that "consign" was essentially a separate modifier
(when you say that "consign" causes the build or content signature to
be used from the consign file, it wasn't clear that you meant that a
signature from the consign file would be selected, *which* one would
depend upon whether "consign" was used). It also seems that not using
"consign" would not be a typical use case--I wonder if it would be
worth leaving this out of this interface, and having some other way to
specify this one? Or at least default it--so rather than having to
specify "consign", you'd specify something like "nocache", to indicate
that no caching of signatures would occur (unless I've misunderstood
the intent completely). "nocache" might also be better if we moved to
other methods for caching signatures, rather than a .consign file per
directory.
Second, I found the examples confusing because I was initially trying
to make sense of them--until I realized they were just random examples,
and didn't actually make any sense... In particular, the examples
include use of "consign" and not, and readers might think that there is
more significance here than is warranted. So if the examples could be
real, that would really help. And if some motivation for using
"consign", or rather not using it, could be included, that would also
help.
Finally, I noticed the example for the contents of a .consign file did
not include an instance of a content signature. It'd be good if it
could.
Thanks for all your hard work on this.
Bob
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